October 2025 update!
hall of mirrors + subsumed-by-the-river-of-time edition
Hello friends! I am reporting to you live from an autumnally-tinged Portland, Oregon, home to gaggles of incoming gestapo who no doubt will soon suffer from bioswale envy and hastily-created spreadsheets to track the best westside food carts that use yak butter. What a time to breathe and be grateful for the opportunity. Let’s begin:
WHAT HAPPENED IN SEPTEMBER (BROAD STROKES):
- I made new short film How Do You Move in This World?, currently out to festivals. more here.
- Celebrated 25th anniversary of MM and me getting married. (more below)
- Cut new trailer for Grief Stick (see below.)
- Got a photo accepted for publication in national magazine (more soon.)
- Subsumed myself to the River of Time momentarily but then for longer (more below.)
- Saw SWANS at Revolution Hall (more below.)
- Sold a copy of my 5 song EP, Storm Clouds (thanks Ber!) my first official sale as a musician. Check it out here.
BEST THINGS I READ IN SEPTEMBER: Shred Sisters by Betsey Lerner, The Waiting by Michael Connelly, Transit by Rachel Cusk
BEST THINGS I SAW IN SEPTEMBER: Weapons (at the Hollywood Theater), Billy Joel documentary on HBO (I have no real interest in Billy Joel whatsoever which probably enhanced the film for me), S1 of The Pitt (rewatch for me, first time for MM), One Battle After Another (at the Hollywood Theater in 70 mm; this film was shot partially in Humboldt County, which intensified the hall of mirrors/river of time sensations I’ve been riding lately. see below)
Therein ends the thumbnail sketch of September 2025. More details about some of the above is below.
FILM PROJECT UPDATES
Grief Stick (short documentary, 18 min)
Exited to report Grief Stick has 3 screenings in Portland this fall:
Sunday October 19 at Turn! Turn! Turn! in NE Portland. with musical guests Arch Cape and Mae Star, featuring a poetry reading by Alex Behr. more here
Friday November 7 at Up Up Books as part of the Portland Book Festival, shown at a reading with 3 poets titled Conversing with the Dead. More specific details to come.
Sunday November 17 at PSU. Details to come.
After a great screening in February at Tomorrow Theater, Grief Stick sort of slipped into the background of my focus due to several factors - other projects, parenthood, day job et cetera - but new fall screenings being scheduled returned it to the forefront. While it was dark and thorny subject matter to work with, and while some viewers may resist or even fear it, I feel a deep affinity for this project and am confident it will find its audience over time. More details on screenings will appear at griefstick.com. Meantime, please check out our new trailer:
Apology Ghost (narrative short, 5 min) - world premiere’d in August at Defy Film Festival in Nashville. Currently out to festivals. more about Apology Ghost here.
Sister/Brother (narrative feature, 75 min) - currently editing. More about the project here.
SWANS AT REVOLUTION HALL, SEPTEMBER 24TH
What can be said but yes. My second time seeing them. Not to be too flowery but it was a near out-of-body experience that touched me at the core of my person/s and I also couldn’t stop smiling, which if you know me, you know is definitely not my default setting. MM could not come so I gave ticket to MS who was not a fan going in but was moved coming out.
25TH ANNIVERSARY RECAP
On September 19*, MM and I drove down to Humboldt County, where we met, went to college, and where we got married (several years after we graduated and had moved away to Los Angeles). We ate at the same restaurant that hosted our rehearsal dinner 25 years prior, we went to Cafe Mokka, saw Jervis at the North Country Fair, bought supplies at the Arcata Co-op where we saw DJ Red, went to Wedding Rock (where we were married 25 years prior) and then to Red Alder Grove (where our dinner and party after the ceremony was 25 years prior) to stand around the fire pit catching up with friends as a thick fog fell. Suffice it to say that it was one of those hall-of-mirrors enterprises with multiple corridors of sense-memory refracted, reflected back, and happening all at once. At dinner I very nearly had to step outside because I could feel the low stirrings of a panic attack approach, sourced solely to the fact that multiple rivers of time were flowing through and around me. It was not an entirely pleasant sensation, at once a diminishment of personhood and individuality and also a multivalent cosmic pronouncement, reverberating on several planes and sensory levels. There was the me in that space pre MM (circa 1992-1995), during MM (circa summer 1996-spring 1997), the me and MM returning to Humboldt for the wedding (September 2000), and the us of that second in time twenty-five years later, as well as presumed future ghosts, that I could feel - all related phantasmic iterations in unknowing conversation, all existing at once, rocketing past at breakneck speed.
(*September 19 also happens to be the 20th anniversary of us getting in a rented mini-van to drive across the country to Cambridge MA, to live in a hotel for 2.5 months so I could get 35 sessions of proton beam radiation on my brain tumor. (You can read about that journey - and the return trip - in M’s piece in Oregon Humanities here). Below is a brief video of our 2005 trip out including: our rented mini-van in the driveway just before leaving, Grand Avenue in Portland, trees and hills whirring past somewhere near Missoula, our dog Maxwell, Badlands SD, Niagara Falls. [note: I have more video from this corridor of my life on mini-DV tapes that I really need to digitize one of these months.]. )
Contained within this 2005 trip to Boston for me is what happened and the memory of what happened, alongside what could have happened and the corresponding gratitude/guilt that it didn’t, each a pathway with ten thousand sub-pathways, all connecting to the ghost iterations I was in college referenced above, and all of them ending at the person right now sitting in his office typing out these words. If I was more of an adventurous spirit I reckon I could come off my knees into a crouch and ride the waves with joyous abandon but I am not that person, or at least I am not that person in this current iteration. I have felt this relationship to time - feeling multiple past/present/future timelines existing as ellipsis or cycle - increasingly in different registers as I age and am not sure where to put it or how to address it. Do you ever also feel anything akin to this? Is this a common thing or a me thing? Or a me-for-therapy thing? (You don’t have to answer really, it’s rhetorical. ) This essay, Winter Light by Douglas Penick about old age as relates to time, including a closing quote from Andre Gregory, was a balm of sorts for me (even though i’m comparatively young.)
Okay that’s it for now. I hope your October is filled with gold in whatever form you need and that you find sustained peace and mercy among the increasingly sisyphean tyranny of the every day.
bye xo